I met Do?a Berta Gomez in the spare living room of the tiny home where she lived for nearly 90 years and where she was then occupying her days with Rosary, Bible and gazing out the front window at a Hermosa Beach neighborhood utterly transformed by time.

Do?a is, of course, an honorific bestowed on the worthy. And few people in the Latino community that did much of the South Bay’s muscle work during the past century were more worthy than this woman, who died two weeks ago at the age of 105.

I was invited to meet Do?a Berta on a sunny morning two years ago by Alex Areyan, who had known her his entire life. A retired labor relations arbitrator, he was then completing a book on what he called the “invisible community,” the Mexican-Americans who long comprised the area’s largest minority enclaves while remaining the people almost nobody thinks of when summoning beach city visions.

An outsider like me needed somebody like Areyan to meet this daughter of a Mexican civil servant who lived in a house that city covenants would not allow her to buy because of her ethnicity when she moved into the place in 1920.

Over time, Do?a Berta – who was named by German expatriate godparents – would become the spiritual mother of a community that produced Areyan, Judge Ricardo Cordova, Redondo Beach Councilman Steven Colin, attorney Ronald Cawdrey and Amador Espinosa, a World War II flier who worked 50 years in administration with the Redondo Beach police but was initially prevented from becoming a sworn officer because of his Mexican heritage.

Such vanished prejudices might have sent Do?a Berta, who came here from Mexico at age 14 to escape civil unrest and married a man 20 years her senior a year later, packing inland had the right to buy the house she would occupy for the rest of her life not been willed her by her landlord.

Areyan preserved these memories in “Mexican Americans in Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach,” his book about travail, striving and courage. In short, this man who was nearly ejected from Redondo Union High School in 1959 for speaking Spanish on campus did what other histories of the South Bay did not.

He recalls how, between 1920 and the 1950s, Mexican-Americans could not own property in many parts of the beach cities. Nor could they, during the years prior to World War II, use the old Redondo Beach Plunge. This while local Mexican-Americans joined the armed forces in droves, strung the Pacific Electric power lines, helped build the Palos Verdes Library and the Edison plant and – in 1921 – erected the original Our Lady of Guadalupe Church with sweat, money-raising fiestas and tortillas made in her kitchen and sold door to door by Do?a Berta.

But even that devotion turned into a fighting issue 37 years later when, in 1956, the then-archbishop wanted to hang a less Mexican name on the church building that stands today.

Do?a Berta – tiny as a child and as dignified as royalty – survived all that. She survived the Great Depression, the loss of her husband and two grown children. She survived everything and nearly everyone to gaze out from her modest first-growth home at the modern architectural marvels that came to dominate Second Street near Ardmore Avenue.

As her world shrunk to one of caretakers, relatives and visitors, most of the Latinos Do?a Berta saw were gardeners and nannies passing by in a neighborhood where run-wild kids and close-knit families had long since been supplanted by wealth.

On the day we met she described the bewildering passage of time and the generations coming up, living their lives and vanishing and about how she refused to remarry after her husband’s death because, to her, marriage was forever.

Areyan called Do?a Berta an institution within this hard-working community, a living legend with her hair pulled smoothly back to reveal dark eyes, high cheekbones and an air of refined grace now rare in this world.

As a young woman during the Depression, she was famous for feeding tortillas, rice and beans on permanently erected tables in the backyard to anybody who came to her door hungry as long as they weren’t drunk. During World War II she saved and stored all the worldly possessions of Japanese neighbors sent to an internment camp.

“She was a woman who never lost her famous dignity,” said granddaughter Robin Marquez of Lawndale. “And she was never sick and not even on medication.”

A month ago Do?a Berta suffered a stroke. She was first taken to Little Company of Mary Hospital, then transferred to a long-term-care facility where she made her final wish clear to Robin’s sister, Margarita Carrillo.

“If you don’t take me home,” she said, “God will punish you.”

Do?a Berta Gomez, this woman who had seen the South Bay transformed, died in her own bed, in the very room where she has slept since 1920, on June 9. She was 105.

Marquez called it a peaceful end to a long and decent life. Over the weekend her two granddaughters, their brother, Richard Duarte, and many friends buried her at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.

“She was always the same, never changing,” said Duarte, 66. “She was always there to make sure that we did the right thing, always there with her Bible. She was honest, outspoken, hard-working, giving and she didn’t believe in gossip.”

Said Areyan: “It’s like a piece of our Hispanic heritage has burned down. She saw the bad times and she endured to become a symbol. She was a quiet sentinel of our culture and a symbol of what was right vanished now.”

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